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Sunday, January 1, 2012

Twenty-Eleven: A Year in Retrospect

by Angie

As I think about 2011, I have been reflecting on the things I’ve learned, and how I’ve changed and grown over the year. We started this blog in December 2010 and really got going strong in early 2011. However, we finished up the second half of the year with relatively few posts. We’re still playing games, and we have a lot of fun ideas for posts bouncing around, but they never seem to make it onto the blog. This is something we are hoping to remedy this year, and so we’ve identified what was keeping us from posting more frequently and are going to try to remedy those issues.

OUCH!

The first major issue is that I have been recovering from a head injury and related complications, which has made it hard for me to use the computer, read rulebooks, or write for more than a few minutes at a time. This has seriously impacted our gaming, blogging, and every other aspect of our lives. I’m on medical leave from my doctoral program and focusing on getting better and taking care of myself and my family. As I continue to work on recovering, I am hoping to begin posting more frequently again.

Lessons Learned

The second thing we’ve come to realize is that we love to blog about things spontaneously, whenever and about whatever ideas strike us. As our blog started getting followed and noticed more, we began receiving (and occasionally soliciting) review copies of games we were excited about. Turns out, reviewing games on any kind of schedule is just not for us. We love to talk about games we enjoy, and we are very grateful to receive games from companies and individuals, but we got overloaded very quickly with games to play, reviews to write, and stuff to keep up on. As review games rolled in, we tried all kinds of lists and systems to keep track of what needed to be played and written about… and it became very overwhelming for us. Kudos to the prolific reviewers out there, I never realized how much effort and consistency goes into providing high quality reviews regularly. Unfortunately for us, gaming started to feel a bit like working and when we had some free time instead of sitting down to play whatever seemed like fun at the time we’d look at the big list on the wall and sigh, many times electing to do something like watch TV over learning a new game. No one wants their reviews to be written by someone in that frame of mind, and we don’t want to feel compelled to “have to” play or write about anything specific… so our new policy is that we are not going to be “game reviewers”. We will likely still review games from time to time, but it will be because we are passionate and excited to do so. We’re very sorry to everyone who has sent us a game and not seen a post about it, there are a lot of great games out there and we have loved the opportunity to try new ones out, but we just can’t keep up with playing and reviewing games like "the pros" at this point in our lives.

One Game to Rule Them Us All

The third factor that has influenced our lack of blogging is that we’ve become smitten with Magic: the Gathering again, and Katie has discovered a new passion. We’ve been playing and thinking about and talking about Magic more than any other game, but we are such casual kitchen table Magic players that we haven’t really felt that we’ve had many meaningful things to say on the subject. Well, we’re over that, and have decided to just share our love of Magic with you all for as long as it’s what we’re playing together as a family. We’re still going to talk about board games and video games, but why not throw Magic in the mix?

Katie's first game of Commander, 1/1/2012

Thanks to all of you who have hung in there with us this past year, and welcome to all the new readers out there. We’re just a family of gamers who love playing together and talking about our experiences. Our journey as bloggers has hit a few bumps through the year, but we’re still here and we’re glad you are too!

Nice self-examination. The decision to not focus on game reviews was probably hard for you, but sounds like it could be a "burden lifted" and that should pay off for your blog! I look forward to your thoughts and posts throughout 2012 - before the world ends, that is! :-)